What Is An Expat?

Last Tuesday, Guli and I traipsed on down to the US Embassy in Abu Dhabi, which is about an hour or so away from Dubai. As my tenure here is ending, it was about past time to put in for her residency for the USA. As a side note, I’d like to point out that the embassy is a really bizarre semi-triangular shape that looks like the bow of a sinking ship poking out over the water. It’s very strange. After several rounds of showing paperwork and waiting again, they told us that it’d have to go to USCIS for approval, which is going to be around 4 weeks probably, but if we haven’t heard from them in 6 weeks to check in. That sounded quite doable. (more…)

…and obviously therefore still alive.

I’m probably going to break down the posts into shorter blocks, as otherwise you will not see any for months! My usual pattern was to take leave, and wait for a few months after I got back to post anything. That would appear to be impractical now.

So, here I am quite coincidentally in Commie Central of Dubai. Spot The Commie is almost no fun at this point. I had an amusing time at the Uzbek Consulate today working on a visa. You’ll see it later, and rest assured it has earned a Title With All Caps. Err..starting with all caps. Sorry for the confusion to the pedantic among you. And me.

Prolly here for a week, though hopefully less. Ikromonjon is on the case!

PS – Sounds like they have a lot of incoming here, except they don’t. My perceptions have been altered. I’ll be okay in a few days prolly. I haven’t embarassed myself anymore than you would already expect me to have though.

Yes, I dredged up some older posts from another board. I started to get a little confused on which had been posted where, and didn’t want to leave stories untold, or worse yet told twice. I’m getting short and need to clear out the story queue before I go, because that will become an adventure too.

In a nutshell: I start out of here 1 January. Will spend a few days in Dubai with friends, doing a dive or a few, and a little bit o’ networking if I can. I’ll come back to that. (more…)

Hey Man, It’s Like A War or Something!

Mosul Palace

Woohoo! Time to get out for a bit again, and go to Dubai for a few days. It’s been in planning for many weeks now. As it turns out, my timing has put it into a very busy time. Oops. It will be nice, since things have been rather active here since the start of Ramadan, whereas before you’d get an attack just at the end of the call to prayer as if to punctuate it with a concussive and shrapnel filled “amen.” I’d comment on the etymology of “amen” but that would be digressing even farther than usual for me. Also, I may have used the word describing the study of bugs instead of word origins there. I don’t feel like looking it up though. Where was I?

Oh yes, anyways, during Ramadan we got hit several times a day. Before, it was just harassment fire. Then I think they started trying to kill people. Very ill-mannered of them.

And then Fallujah kicked off. (more…)